The purpose of this paper is to understand how socioeconomic factors can affect physics' performance in the Brazilian National Assessment of Secondary Education (Enem) applied in 2012. From the microdata were calculated averages and alternative's frequencies; and in addition was elaborated a socioeconomic status indicator. The items were separated into four categories: fixation exercises; pencil and paper problems; day-to-day contextualized problems and modern and contemporary physics. Fixation exercises and pencil and paper problems present greater performance gap between social classes, where the upper class mean (close to 0.7) is up to two times high than that from lower class. In the case of pencil and pen problems, the presence of misconceptions or non-scientific conception as a wrong alternative can attract the majority of candidates. When items are related to day-to-day or modern and contemporary physics, all social classes present scores close to 0.3. For contextualized problems, the average is low for all candidates suggesting difficulties in the transposition of physics fundaments to daily life problems. Mean for modern and contemporary physics is low, close to the aleatory answer. We hope that these analyzes can help basic education teachers to better meet the students' needs in understanding physics.
Keywords:
Enem; Items; Context; Assessment; Evaluation
